Insights to actions

When you are coaching someone who likes to think in metaphors, or someone who loves thinking in abstracts or when a client is really interested in exploring their preferred future or past resources, you can co-create beautiful insights together. The client has an “AHA-moment” of the type: “Wow, I have never thought or felt like this before!”

As Mark McKergow writes in his book “The next generation of Solution Focused Practice: Stretching the world for new opportunities and progress”, the world of the client becomes bigger. Possibilities that were once unthinkable now seem feasible. As the client shifts how they understand themselves, their world shifts into a world that offers more opportunities, “affordances” in philosophical terms, than before.

At this point, many clients are happy with closing the session. They had a “Wow!” moment and they are a bit flabbergasted looking at this new world that is opening for them. Of course, if clients want to close the session in this moment and would like to just sit with their new insights for a bit, this is completely fine. However, I think that in the client is invited to describe the new world in observable details, this can help them remember this world, the new opportunities and thereby make it more real.

Here are some questions that may facilitate this shift from the “AHA!” to the “and this is what it will look like in the future”:

- Suppose you carry this insight with you into the next weeks, how are you going to notice the difference it makes?

- What are others going to notice that tells them that you had this insight?

- How will they respond to you?

- How will you respond to them?

- What else might tell you that you are living in this new world that the insight is opening to you?

- What might you do or feel differently?

Of course, you would customize the word “insight” to whatever it is the client is saying and would not simply rattle down the list of questions, but you get the gist. Inviting the client to describe the new world and how they would be acting and feeling differently in it can really help the client to remember and recognize the difference the insight is making.

If you want to explore your insights, bring in questions or just hang out with a bunch of cool people, why not join one of our free meetups and exchanges?

Reference:

McKergow, M. (2021). The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice: Stretching the World for New Opportunities and Progress (1st ed.). Routledge. ISBN 9780367428839.

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